Overview

We are pleased to provide you with a summary of our August, 2012 release, including new features and resolved issues.

New Features

This release includes the following new features and enhancements.

Zuora Billing and Payments

The following features have been added to Z-Billing and Z-Payments.

Export changes

For general system improvements, we changed the way you export subscriptions, orders, and the product catalog. These export processes are now asynchronous, which allows you to download the export file multiple times without having to repeat the export process each time.

To export subscriptions, orders, or the product catalog:

Click the appropriate link:

Export Product Catalog link on the Product Catalog page

Export Subscriptions on the Subscriptions page

Export Orders link on either the Subscriptions page or the Amendments page

The Exports page opens and the appropriate item is automatically selected for you in the Export Data list.

Click the Export button to start the export process.

Give the process time to finish, then refresh the page.
The amount of time the process needs depends on the amount if data. Because the process is asynchronous, you can leave the page and do other things while you wait. When the process is finished, there is an export file link.

Click the filename link to download the data.

The product catalog export file is an Excel 2007 file (.xlsx), which limits the maximum number of rows to 1048576 and the maximum number of columns to 16384. These maximums are higher than the previous Excel 2003 version of the export file.

The export files for subscriptions and orders are .csv files.

For more information on exporting objects in Zuora, including the product catalog, see Exporting Object Data.

Adding a currency symbol next to the invoice amount in a notification

In this release, we added the new merge field, Account.CurrencySymbol, for the following notifications, which are account-currency aware:

Manual Email for Payment

Payment Declined

Payment Processed

Invoice Posted

Invoice Past Due, Account Summary

Manual Email for Invoice

New Subscription Created

The new merge field is Account.CurrencySymbol, and is available in the email template. To use the new merge field, edit the email template like this: <Account.CurrencySymbol> <Account.Balance>

The notification engine replaces these merge fields with content like this: $1234.56

Alternately, you can reverse the order of the merge fields like this: <Account.Balance> <Account.CurrencySymbol>

The notification engine replaces these merge fields with content like this: 1234.56 €

The value of the Account.CurrencySymbol merge field is the currency symbol, not the currency code, regardless of the tenant locale.

Zuora API

The following features have been added to the Zuora API.

WSDL Version

The Zuora WSDL has been updated to version 41.0. See Zuora WSDLfor information about downloading the latest version.

Support for discount charge models in the ProductRatePlanCharge object

Previously, if you created a charge model for DiscountFixedAmount or DiscountPercentage, you received the INVALID_VERSION error, "Not supported charge model: Discount-Percentage" or "Not supported charge model: Discount-FixedAmount."

In this release, you can query, create, and update discount charge models. These models were available previously in the web-based UI; now they are also available in the API.

The ProductRatePlanCharge object has the following new fields:

ApplyDiscountTo

DiscountLevel

UpToPeriods

The operations for the field, UseDiscountSpecificAccountingCode, in the ProductRatePlanCharge object used to be read only. Now you can use the create, update, and read operations.

The ProductRatePlanChargeTier object has the following new fields:

DiscountAmount

DiscountPercentage

When you update your WSDL from 40.0 or earlier to 41.0, you need to change the price field in existing queries to DiscountAmount or DiscountPercentage.

Resolved Issues

Billing and Payments

DE7920: Subscription cancellation validation errors

When you close an accounting period, Zuora will help you prevent operations on subscriptions that may introduce financial impacts in closed accounting periods.

One of these operations is cancelling a subscription. When cancelling a subscription, Zuora allows you to enter a contract effective date and a cancellation date. The defect is that Zuora is using the contract effective date entered to determine whether we should allow you to cancel a subscription. That is, if the contract effective date falls into a closed accounting period, then we do not allow cancellation. That is not the correct behavior.

In this release, we have fixed the cancellation process. Zuora now uses the cancellation date to determine whether we should allow you to cancel a subscription. If the cancellation date falls into a closed accounting period, then we do not allow the cancellation.

DE8041: Error message for volume pricing

In this release, we removed an error message that incorrectly appeared when users update a volume pricing model.

DE9659: Enforcement of maximum number of subscriptions

The maximum number of subscriptions for a single account is 3000 subscriptions. In this release, this maximum is enforced.

Z-Force

In previous releases, syncing the Subscription object to Salesforce.com with Z-Force 360 failed if the Rate Plan Effective End Dates were set to Fri Dec 31 00:00:00 GMT 9999.

This has been fixed in this release. If the Effective End Dates are out of the valid range for Salesforce.com (from 1700-01-01 to 4000-12-31), they will be mapped to the closest valid date. The dates will not be changed in Zuora.

Zuora API

The following issues were resolved in the Zuora API.

DE9780: Case sensitivity for ImportId

In previous releases, the ImportId parameter in a query response incorrectly used lowercase.

In this release, the query correctly responds with ImportId.

DE9804: History for invoice PDF regeneration

In our July release, we added a capability to regenerate PDF invoices via an API call, but we did not record such PDF regenerations in an invoice's history. We have resolved this issue in this release.

DE9810: Maximum invoice PDF regeneration

Previously, each PDF invoice could only be regenerated a maximum of 3 times via the Zuora API. In this release, we no longer enforce this maximum.